Elizabeth Pinborough grew up in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains and in the bluegrass country of western Kentucky. As a Salt Lake City local, Pinborough came to live in the valley through ancestors who trekked across the plains as Mormon pioneers. She studied English at Brigham Young University and religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, where she was a scholarship member of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. As a Yale student she joined a group of artists, poets, theologians, and activists lovingly named “Inkwings,” after the famous Inklings.
Situated in a Mormon context, she has been published in two anthologies of Latter-day Saint poets, Fire in the Pasture and Dove Song. Her work has appeared in print and online in The Friend magazine, segullah.org, Exponent II magazine, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Psaltery & Lyre, and Wilderness Interface Zone. Her edited collection Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture explored women’s reflections on their inherited material culture. Her first book of poetry, The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms & Other Observations, which will be released by BCCPress in 2020, represents the neurodevotional poetry and linocut prints she created as she rewrote herself during traumatic brain injury recovery.
Pinborough won a Dialogue “New Voices” poetry award for her cycle of poems, “A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal,” based on undergraduate research into Shaker aesthetics through a tour of 6 Shaker communities. Her choral poem “Dorcas Resurrexit” won runner up in the 2016 Exponent magazine midrash contest. Pinborough works as a freelance writer, editor, and artist in Salt Lake City. In her free time she studies the brain and human development, her greatest passion.
Works
Bibliography
- The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms & Other Observations, BCC Press (forthcoming in 2020).
- Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture (Exponent II, 2011).
